CAT Forklift MCFE GC25 Electrical Diagram

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habit, and our fate is decided by choice. Was Shenstone to become
an active or contemplative being? He yielded to nature!56

It was now that he entered into another species of poetry,

working with too costly materials, in the magical composition of
plants, water, and earth; with these he created those emotions
which his more strictly poetical ones failed to excite. He planned a
paradise amidst his solitude. When we consider that Shenstone, in
developing his fine pastoral ideas in the Leasowes, educated the
nation into that taste for landscape-gardening, which has become
the model of all Europe, this itself constitutes a claim on the
gratitude of posterity.57 Thus the private pleasures of a man of
genius may become at length those of a whole people. The creator
of this new taste appears to have received far less notice than he
merited. The name of Shenstone does not appear in the Essay on
Gardening by Lord Orford: even the supercilious Gray only bestowed
a ludicrous image on these pastoral scenes, which, however, his
friend Mason has celebrated; and the genius of Johnson,
incapacitated by nature to touch on objects of rural fancy, after
describing some of the offices of the landscape designer, adds, that
“he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of
mind.” Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he
immediately expresses them under the character of a “sullen and
surly speculator.” The anxious life of Shenstone would, indeed, have
been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of
Wheatley on the Leasowes; which, said he, “is a perfect picture of
his mind—simple, elegant, and amiable; and will always suggest a
doubt whether the spot inspired his verse, or whether in the scenes
which he formed, he only realized the pastoral images which abound
in his songs.” Yes! Shenstone would have been delighted, could he
have heard that Montesquieu, on his return home, adorned his
“Château gothique, mais orné de bois charmans, dont j’ai pris l’idée
en Angleterre;” and Shenstone, even with his modest and timid
nature, had been proud to have witnessed a noble foreigner, amidst
memorials dedicated to Theocritus and Virgil, to Thomson and
Gesner, raising in his grounds an inscription, in bad English, but in
pure taste, to Shenstone himself for having displayed in his writings
“a mind natural,” and in his Leasowes “laid Arcadian greens rural.”
Recently Pindemonte has traced the taste of English gardening to
Shenstone. A man of genius sometimes receives from foreigners,
who are placed out of the prejudices of his compatriots, the tribute
of posterity!

Amidst these rural elegancies which Shenstone was raising about

him, his muse has pathetically sung his melancholy feelings—

But did the Muses haunt his cell,

Or in his dome did Venus dwell?—
When all the structures shone complete,
Ah, me! ’twas Damon’s own confession,
Came Poverty, and took possession.
The Progress of Taste.

The poet observes, that the wants of philosophy are contracted,

satisfied with “cheap contentment,” but

Taste alone requires

Entire profusion! days and nights, and hours
Thy voice, hydropic Fancy! calls aloud
For costly draughts.——
Economy.
 An original image illustrates that fatal want of economy which
conceals itself amidst the beautiful appearances of taste:—

Some graceless mark,

Some symptom ill-conceal’d, shall soon or late
Burst like a pimple from the vicious tide
Of acid blood, proclaiming want’s disease
Amidst the bloom of show.
Economy.

He paints himself:—

Observe Florelio’s mien;

Why treads my friend with melancholy step
That beauteous lawn? Why pensive strays his eye
O’er statues, grottos, urns, by critic art
Proportion’d fair? or from his lofty dome
Returns his eye unpleased, disconsolate?

The cause is, “criminal expense,” and he exclaims—

Sweet interchange
Of river, valley, mountain, woods, and plains,
How gladsome once he ranged your native turf,
Your simple scenes how raptured! ere Expense
Had lavish’d thousand ornaments, and taught
Convenience to perplex him, Art to pall,
Pomp to deject, and Beauty to displease.
Economy.
 While Shenstone was rearing hazels and hawthorns, opening
vistas, and winding waters;

And having shown them where to stray,

Threw little pebbles in their way;

while he was pulling down hovels and cowhouses, to compose

mottos and inscriptions for garden-seats and urns; while he had so
finely obscured with a tender gloom the grove of Virgil, and thrown
over, “in the midst of a plantation of yew, a bridge of one arch, built
of a dusty-coloured stone, and simple even to rudeness,”58 and
invoked Oberon in some Arcadian scene,

Where in cool grot and mossy cell

The tripping fauns and fairies dwell;

the solitary magician, who had raised all these wonders, was, in
reality, an unfortunate poet, the tenant of a dilapidated farm-house,
where the winds passed through, and the rains lodged, often taking
refuge in his own kitchen—

Far from all resort of mirth,

Save the cricket on the hearth!

In a letter59 of the disconsolate founder of landscape gardening,

our author paints his situation with all its misery—lamenting that his
house is not fit to receive “polite friends, were they so disposed;”
and resolved to banish all others, he proceeds:
 “But I make it a certain rule, ‘arcere profanum vulgus.’ Persons
who will despise you for the want of a good set of chairs, or an
uncouth fire-shovel, at the same time that they can’t taste any
excellence in a mind that overlooks those things; with whom it is in
vain that your mind is furnished, if the walls are naked; indeed one
loses much of one’s acquisitions in virtue by an hour’s converse with
such as judge of merit by money—yet I am now and then impelled
by the social passion to sit half an hour in my kitchen.”

But the solicitude of friends and the fate of Somerville, a

neighbour and a poet, often compelled Shenstone to start amidst his
reveries; and thus he has preserved his feelings and his
irresolutions. Reflecting on the death of Somerville, he writes—

“To be forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to

get rid of the pains of the mind, is a misery which I can well
conceive, because I may, without vanity, esteem myself his equal in
point of economy, and consequently ought to have an eye on his
misfortunes—(as you kindly hinted to me about twelve o’clock, at
the Feathers.)—I should retrench—I will—but you shall not see me—
I will not let you know that I took it in good part—I will do it at
solitary times as I may.”

Such were the calamities of “great taste” with “little fortune;” but
in the case of Shenstone, these were combined with the other
calamity of “mediocrity of genius.”

Here, then, at the Leasowes, with occasional trips to town in

pursuit of fame, which perpetually eluded his grasp; in the
correspondence of a few delicate minds, whose admiration was
substituted for more genuine celebrity; composing diatribes against
economy and taste, while his income was diminishing every year;
our neglected author grew daily more indolent and sedentary, and
withdrawing himself entirely into his own hermitage, moaned and
despaired in an Arcadian solitude.60 The cries and the “secret
sorrows” of Shenstone have come down to us—those of his brothers
have not always! And shall dull men, because they have minds cold
and obscure, like a Lapland year which has no summer, be permitted
to exult over this class of men of sensibility and taste, but of
moderate genius and without fortune? The passions and emotions of
the heart are facts and dates only to those who possess them.

To what a melancholy state was our author reduced, when he thus

addressed his friend:—

“I suppose you have been informed that my fever was in a great

measure hypochondriacal, and left my nerves so extremely sensible,
that even on no very interesting subjects, I could readily think
myself into a vertigo; I had almost said an epilepsy; for surely I was
oftentimes near it.”

The features of this sad portrait are more particularly made out in
another place.

“Now I am come home from a visit, every little uneasiness is

sufficient to introduce my whole train of melancholy considerations,
and to make me utterly dissatisfied with the life I now lead, and the
life which I foresee I shall lead. I am angry and envious, and
dejected and frantic, and disregard all present things, just as
becomes a madman to do. I am infinitely pleased (though it is a
gloomy joy) with the application of Dr. Swift’s complaint, ‘that he is
forced to die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.’ My soul is no
more fitted to the figure I make, than a cable rope to a cambric
needle; I cannot bear to see the advantages alienated, which I think
I could deserve and relish so much more than those that have
them.”

There are other testimonies in his entire correspondence.

Whenever forsaken by his company he describes the horrors around
him, delivered up “to winter, silence, and reflection;” ever foreseeing
himself “returning to the same series of melancholy hours.” His
frame shattered by the whole train of hypochondriacal symptoms,
there was nothing to cheer the querulous author, who with half the
consciousness of genius, lived neglected and unpatronised. His
elegant mind had not the force, by his productions, to draw the
celebrity he sighed after, to his hermitage.

Shenstone was so anxious for his literary character, that he

contemplated on the posthumous fame which he might derive from
the publication of his letters: see Letter lxxix., On hearing his letters
to Mr. Whistler were destroyed; the act of a merchant, his brother,
who being a very sensible man, as Graves describes, yet with the
stupidity of a Goth, destroyed the whole correspondence of
Shenstone, for “its sentimental intercourse.”—Shenstone bitterly
regrets the loss, and says, “I would have given more money for the
letters than it is allowable for me to mention with decency. I look
upon my letters as some of my chefs-d’œuvre—they are the history
of my mind for these twenty years past.” This, with the loss of
Cowley’s correspondence, should have been preserved in the article,
“of Suppressors and Dilapidators of Manuscripts.”

Towards the close of life, when his spirits were exhausted, and
“the silly clue of hopes and expectations,” as he termed them, was
undone, the notice of some persons of rank began to reach him.
Shenstone, however, deeply colours the variable state of his own
mind—”Recovering from a nervous fever, as I have since discovered
by many concurrent symptoms, I seem to anticipate a little of that
‘vernal delight’ which Milton mentions and thinks

———able to chase
All sadness but despair—

at least I begin to resume my silly clue of hopes and expectations.”

In a former letter he had, however, given them up: “I begin to

wean myself from all hopes and expectations whatever. I feed my
wild-ducks, and I water my carnations. Happy enough if I could
extinguish my ambition quite, to indulge the desire of being
something more beneficial in my sphere.—Perhaps some few other
circumstances would want also to be adjusted.”

What were these “hopes and expectations,” from which sometimes

he weans himself, and which are perpetually revived, and are
attributed to “an ambition he cannot extinguish”? This article has
been written in vain, if the reader has not already perceived, that
they had haunted him in early life; sickening his spirit after the
possession of a poetical celebrity, unattainable by his genius; some
expectations too he might have cherished from the talent he
possessed for political studies, in which Graves confidently says, that
“he would have made no inconsiderable figure, if he had had a
sufficient motive for applying his mind to them.” Shenstone has left
several proofs of this talent.61 But his master-passion for literary
fame had produced little more than anxieties and disappointments;
and when he indulged his pastoral fancy in a beautiful creation on
his grounds, it consumed the estate which it adorned. Johnson
forcibly expressed his situation: “His death was probably hastened
by his anxieties. He was a lamp that spent its oil in blazing. It is said,
that if he had lived a little longer, he would have been assisted by a
pension.”

53 This once-celebrated abode of the poet is situated at Hales-Owen, Shropshire.

54 This we learn from Dr. Nash’s History of Worcestershire.

55 While at college he printed, without his name, a small volume of verses, with this
title, “Poems upon various Occasions, written for the Entertainment of the Author, and
printed for the Amusement of a few Friends, prejudiced in his Favour.” Oxford, 1737.
12mo.—Nash’s “History of Worcestershire,” vol. i. p. 528.

I find this notice of it in W. Lowndes’s Catalogue; 4433 Shenstone (W.) Poems, 3l.
13s. 6d.—(Shenstone took uncommon pains to suppress this book, by collecting and
destroying copies wherever he met with them.)—In, Longman’s Bibliotheca Anglo-
Poetica, it is valued at 15l. Oxf. 1737. Mr. Harris informs me, that about the year 1770,
Fletcher, the bookseller, at Oxford, had many copies of this first edition, which he sold
at Eighteen pence each. These prices are amusing! The prices of books are connected
with their history.

56 On this subject Graves makes a very useful observation. “In this decision the
happiness of Mr. Shenstone was materially concerned. Whether he determined wisely
or not, people of taste and people of worldly prudence will probably be of very
different opinions. I somewhat suspect, that ‘people of worldly prudence’ are not half
the fools that ‘people of taste’ insist they are.”

57 Shenstone’s farm was surrounded by winding walks, decorated with vases and
statues, varied by wood and water, and occasionally embracing fine views over
Frankley and Clent Hills, and the country about Cradley, Dudley, Rawley, and the
intermediate places. Some of his vases were inscribed to the memory of relatives and
friends. One had a Latin inscription to his cousin Maria, another was dedicated to
Somerville his poet-friend. In different parts of his domain he constructed buildings at
once useful and ornamental, destined to serve farm-purposes, but to be also grateful
to the eye. A Chinese bridge led to a temple beside a lake, and near was a seat
inscribed with the popular Shropshire toast to “all friends round the Wrekin,” the spot
commanding a distant view of the hill so named. A wild path through a small wood led
to an ingeniously constructed root-house, beside which a rivulet ran which helped to
form the lake already mentioned; on its banks was a dedicatory urn to the Genio Loci.
The general effect of the whole place was highly praised in the poet’s time. It was
neglected at his death; and its description is now but a record of the past.

58 Wheatley, on “Modern Gardening,” p. 172. Edition 5th.

59 In “Hull’s Collection,” vol. ii. letter ii.

60 Graves was supposed to have glanced at his friend Shenstone in his novel of
“Columella; or, the Distressed Anchoret.” The aim of this work is to convey all the moral
instruction I could wish to offer here to youthful genius. It is written to show the
consequence of a person of education and talents retiring to solitude and indolence in
the vigour of youth. Nichols’s “Literary Anecdotes,” vol. iii. p. 134. Nash’s “History of
Worcestershire,” vol. i. p. 528.

61 See his “Letters” xl. and xli., and more particularly xlii. and xliii., with a new
theory of political principles.

SECRET HISTORY OF THE BUILDING OF BLENHEIM.

The secret history of this national edifice derives importance from its
nature, and the remarkable characters involved in the unparalleled
transaction. The great architect, when obstructed in the progress of
his work by the irregular payments of the workmen, appears to have
practised one of his own comic plots to put the debts on the hero
himself; while the duke, who had it much at heart to inhabit the
palace of his fame, but tutored into wariness under the vigilant and
fierce eye of Atossa,62 would neither approve nor disapprove, silently
looked on in hope and in grief, from year to year, as the work
proceeded, or as it was left at a stand. At length we find this
comédie larmoyante wound up by the duchess herself, in an attempt
utterly to ruin the enraged and insulted architect!63

Perhaps this was the first time that it had ever been resolved in
parliament to raise a public monument of glory and gratitude—to an
individual! The novelty of the attempt may serve as the only excuse
for the loose arrangements which followed after parliament had
approved of the design, without voting any specific supply for the
purpose! The queen always issued the orders at her own expense,
and commanded expedition; and while Anne lived, the expenses of
the building were included in her majesty’s debts, as belonging to
the civil list sanctioned by parliament.64

When George the First came to the throne, the parliament

declared the debt to be the debt of the queen, and the king granted
a privy seal as for other debts. The crown and the parliament had
hitherto proceeded in perfect union respecting this national edifice.
However, I find that the workmen were greatly in arrears; for when
George the First ascended the throne, they gladly accepted a third
part of their several debts!

The great architect found himself amidst inextricable difficulties.

With the fertile invention which amuses in his comedies, he
contrived an extraordinary scheme, by which he proposed to make
the duke himself responsible for the building of Blenheim!

However much the duke longed to see the magnificent edifice

concluded, he showed the same calm intrepidity in the building of
Blenheim as he had in its field of action. Aware that if he himself
gave any order, or suggested any alteration, he might be involved in
the expense of the building, he was never to be circumvented—
never to be surprised into a spontaneous emotion of pleasure or
disapprobation; on no occasion, he declares, had he even entered
into conversation with the architect (though his friend) or with any
one acting under his orders, about Blenheim House! Such
impenetrable prudence on all sides had often blunted the subdolous
ingenuity of the architect and plotter of comedies!

In the absence of the duke, when abroad in 1705, Sir John

contrived to obtain from Lord Godolphin, the friend and relative of
the Duke of Marlborough, and probably his agent in some of his
concerns, a warrant, constituting Vanbrugh surveyor, with power of
contracting on the behalf of the Duke of Marlborough. How he
prevailed on Lord Godolphin to get this appointment does not
appear—his lordship probably conceived it was useful, and might
assist in expediting the great work, the favourite object of the hero.
This warrant, however, Vanbrugh kept entirely to himself; he never
mentioned to the duke that he was in possession of any such power;
nor, on his return, did he claim to have it renewed.

The building proceeded with the same delays, and the payments
with the same irregularity; the veteran now foresaw what happened,
that he should never be the inhabitant of his own house! The public
money issued from the Treasury was never to be depended on; and
after 1712, the duke took the building upon himself, for the purpose
of accommodating the workmen. They had hitherto received what
was called “crown pay,” which was high wages and uncertain
payment—and they now gladly abated a third of their prices. But
though the duke had undertaken to pay the workmen, this could
make no alteration in the claims on the Treasury. Blenheim was to be
built for Marlborough, not by him; it was a monument raised by the
nation to their hero, not a palace to be built by their mutual
contributions.

Whether Marlborough found that his own million might be slowly

injured while the Treasury remained still obdurate, or that the
architect was still more and more involved, I cannot tell; but in 1715,
the workmen appear to have struck, and the old delays and stand-
still again renewed. It was then Sir John, for the first time, produced
the warrant he had extracted from Lord Godolphin, to lay before the
Treasury; adding, however, a memorandum, to prevent any
misconception, that the duke was to be considered as the
paymaster, the debts incurred devolving on the crown. This part of
our secret history requires more development than I am enabled to
afford: as my information is drawn from “the Case” of the Duke of
Marlborough in reply to Sir John’s depositions, it is possible
Vanbrugh may suffer more than he ought in this narration; which,
however, incidentally notices his own statements.

A new scene opens! Vanbrugh not obtaining his claims from the
Treasury, and the workmen becoming more clamorous, the architect
suddenly turns round on the duke, at once to charge him with the
whole debt.

The pitiable history of this magnificent monument of public

gratitude, from its beginnings, is given by Vanbrugh in his
deposition. The great architect represents himself as being
comptroller of her majesty’s works; and as such was appointed to
prepare a model, which model of Blenheim House her majesty kept
in her palace, and gave her commands to issue money according to
the direction of Mr. Travers, the queen’s surveyor-general; that the
lord treasurer appointed her majesty’s own officers to supervise
these works; that it was upon defect of money from the Treasury
that the workmen grew uneasy; that the work was stopped, till
further orders of money from the Treasury; that the queen then
ordered enough to secure it from winter weather; that afterwards
she ordered more for payment of the workmen; that they were paid
in part; and upon Sir John’s telling them the queen’s resolution to
grant them a further supply (after a stop put to it by the duchess’s
order), they went on and incurred the present debt; that this was
afterwards brought into the House of Commons as the debt of the
crown, not owing from the queen to the Duke of Marlborough, but
to the workmen, and this by the queen’s officers.

During the uncertain progress of the building, and while the

workmen were often in deep arrears, it would seem that the
architect often designed to involve the Marlboroughs in its fate and
his own; he probably thought that some of their round million might
bear to be chipped, to finish his great work, with which, too, their
glory was so intimately connected. The famous duchess had
evidently put the duke on the defensive; but once, perhaps, was the
duke on the point of indulging some generous architectural fancy,
when lo! Atossa stepped forwards and “put a stop to the building.”

When Vanbrugh at length produced the warrant of Lord

Godolphin, empowering him to contract for the duke, this instrument
was utterly disclaimed by Marlborough; the duke declares it existed
without his knowledge; and that if such an instrument for a moment
was to be held valid, no man would be safe, but might be ruined by
the act of another!

Vanbrugh seems to have involved the intricacy of his plot, till it fell
into some contradictions. The queen he had not found difficult to
manage; but after her death, when the Treasury failed in its golden
source, he seems to have sat down to contrive how to make the
duke the great debtor. Vanbrugh swears that “He himself looked
upon the crown, as engaged to the Duke of Marlborough for the
expense; but that he believes the workmen always looked upon the
duke as their paymaster.” He advances so far, as to swear that he
made a contract with particular workmen, which contract was not
unknown to the duke. This was not denied; but the duke in his reply
observes, that “he knew not that the workmen were employed for
his account, or by his own agent:”—never having heard till Sir John
produced the warrant from Lord Godolphin, that Sir John was “his
surveyor!” which he disclaims.

Our architect, however opposite his depositions appear, contrived

to become a witness to such facts as tended to conclude the duke to
be the debtor for the building; and “in his depositions has taken as
much care to have the guilt of perjury without the punishment of it,
as any man could do.” He so managed, though he has not sworn to
contradictions, that the natural tendency of one part of his evidence
presses one way, and the natural tendency of another part presses
the direct contrary way. In his former memorial, the main design was
to disengage the duke from the debt; in his depositions, the main
design was to charge the duke with the debt. Vanbrugh, it must be
confessed, exerted not less of his dramatic than his architectural
genius in the building of Blenheim!
 “The Case” concludes with an eloquent reflection, where Vanbrugh
is distinguished as the man of genius, though not, in this
predicament, the man of honour. “If at last the charge run into by
order of the crown must be upon the duke, yet the infamy of it must
go upon another, who was perhaps the only architect in the world
capable of building such a house; and the only friend in the world
capable of contriving to lay the debt upon one to whom he was so
highly obliged.”

There is a curious fact in the depositions of Vanbrugh, by which

we might infer that the idea of Blenheim House might have
originated with the duke himself; he swears that “in 1704, the duke
met him, and told him he designed to build a house, and must
consult him about a model, &c.; but it was the queen who ordered
the present house to be built with all expedition.”

The whole conduct of this national edifice was unworthy of the

nation, if in truth the nation ever entered heartily into it. No specific
sum had been voted in parliament for so great an undertaking;
which afterwards was the occasion of involving all the parties
concerned in trouble and litigation; threatened the ruin of the
architect; and I think we shall see, by Vanbrugh’s letters, was
finished at the sole charge, and even under the superintendence, of
the duchess herself! It may be a question, whether this magnificent
monument of glory did not rather originate in the spirit of party, in
the urgent desire of the queen to allay the pride and jealousies of
the Marlboroughs. From the circumstance to which Vanbrugh has
sworn, that the duke had designed to have a house built by
Vanbrugh, before Blenheim had been resolved on, we may suppose
that this intention of the duke’s afforded the queen a suggestion of a
national edifice.
 Archdeacon Coxe, in his Life of Marlborough, has obscurely
alluded to the circumstances attending the building of Blenheim.
“The illness of the duke, and the tedious litigation which ensued,
caused such delays, that little progress was made in the work at the
time of his decease. In the interim a serious misunderstanding arose
between the duchess and the architect, which forms the subject of a
voluminous correspondence. Vanbrugh was in consequence
removed, and the direction of the building confided to other hands,
under her own immediate superintendence.”

This “voluminous correspondence” would probably afford “words

that burn” of the lofty insolence of Atossa, and “thoughts that
breathe” of the comic wit; it might too relate, in many curious
points, to the stupendous fabric itself. If her grace condescended to
criticise its parts with the frank roughness she is known to have
done to the architect himself, his own defence and explanations
might serve to let us into the bewildering fancies of his magical
architecture. Of that self-creation for which he was so much abused
in his own day as to have lost his real avocation as an architect, and
stands condemned for posterity in the volatile bitterness of Lord
Orford, nothing is left for us but our own convictions—to behold, and
to be for ever astonished!—But “this voluminous correspondence?”
Alas! the historian of war and politics overlooks with contempt the
little secret histories of art and of human nature!—and “a
voluminous correspondence” which indicates so much, and on which
not a solitary idea is bestowed, has only served to petrify our
curiosity!

Of this quarrel between the famous duchess and Vanbrugh I have

only recovered several vivacious extracts from confidential letters of
Vanbrugh’s to Jacob Tonson. There was an equality of the genius of
invention, as well as rancour, in her grace and the wit: whether
Atossa, like Vanbrugh, could have had the patience to have
composed a comedy of five acts I will not determine; but
unquestionably she could have dictated many scenes with equal
spirit. We have seen Vanbrugh attempting to turn the debts incurred
by the building of Blenheim on the duke; we now learn, for the first
time, that the duchess, with equal aptitude, contrived a counterplot
to turn the debts on Vanbrugh!

“I have the misfortune of losing, for I now see little hopes of ever
getting it, near 2000l. due to me for many years’ service, plague,
and trouble, at Blenheim, which that wicked woman of ‘Marlborough’
is so far from paying me, that the duke being sued by some of the
workmen for work done there, she has tried to turn the debt due to
them upon me, for which I think she ought to be hanged.”

In 1722, on occasion of the duke’s death, Vanbrugh gives an

account to Tonson of the great wealth of the Marlboroughs, with a
caustic touch at his illustrious victims.

“The Duke of Marlborough’s treasure exceeds the most

extravagant guess. The grand settlement, which it was suspected
her grace had broken to pieces, stands good, and hands an
immense wealth to Lord Godolphin and his successors. A round
million has been moving about in loans on the land-tax, &c. This the
Treasury knew before he died, and this was exclusive of his ‘land;’
his 5000l. a year upon the post-office; his mortgages upon a
distressed estate; his South-Sea stock; his annuities, and which were
not subscribed in, and besides what is in foreign banks; and yet this
man could neither pay his workmen their bills, nor his architect his
salary.
 “He has given his widow (may a Scottish ensign get her!) 10,000l.
a year to spoil Blenheim her own way; 12,000l. a year to keep
herself clean and go to law; 2000l. a year to Lord Rialton for present
maintenance; and Lord Godolphin only 5000l. a year jointure, if he
outlives my lady: this last is a wretched article. The rest of the heap,
for these are but snippings, goes to Lord Godolphin, and so on. She
will have 40,000l. a year in present.”

Atossa, as the quarrel heated and the plot thickened, with the
maliciousness of Puck, and the haughtiness of an empress of
Blenheim, invented the most cruel insult that ever architect endured!
—one perfectly characteristic of that extraordinary woman. Vanbrugh
went to Blenheim with his lady, in a company from Castle Howard,
another magnificent monument of his singular genius.

“We staid two nights in Woodstock; but there was an order to the
servants, under her grace’s own hand, not to let me enter Blenheim!
and lest that should not mortify me enough, she having somehow
learned that my wife was of the company, sent an express the night
before we came there, with orders that if she came with the Castle
Howard ladies, the servants should not suffer her to see either
house, gardens, or even to enter the park: so she was forced to sit
all day long and keep me company at the inn!”

This was a coup-de-théâtre in this joint comedy of Atossa and

Vanbrugh! The architect of Blenheim, lifting his eyes towards his
own massive grandeur, exiled to a dull inn, and imprisoned with one
who required rather to be consoled, than capable of consoling the
enraged architect!

In 1725, Atossa still pursuing her hunted prey, had driven it to a

spot which she flattered herself would enclose it with the security of
a preserve. This produced the following explosion!

“I have been forced into chancery by that B. B. B. the Duchess of

Marlborough, where she has got an injunction upon me by her friend
the late good chancellor (Earl of Macclesfield), who declared that I
was never employed by the duke, and therefore had no demand
upon his estate for my services at Blenheim. Since my hands were
thus tied up from trying by law to recover my arrear, I have
prevailed with Sir Robert Walpole to help me in a scheme which I
proposed to him, by which I got my money in spite of the hussy’s
teeth. My carrying this point enrages her much, and the more
because it is of considerable weight in my small fortune, which she
has heartily endeavoured so to destroy as to throw me into an
English Bastile, there to finish my days, as I began them, in a French
one.”

Plot for plot! and the superior claims of one of practised invention
are vindicated! The writer, long accustomed to comedy-writing, has
excelled the self-taught genius of Atossa. The “scheme” by which
Vanbrugh’s fertile invention, aided by Sir Robert Walpole, finally
circumvented the avaricious, the haughty, and the capricious Atossa,
remains untold, unless it is alluded to by the passage in Lord
Orford’s “Anecdotes of Painting,” where he informs us that the
“duchess quarrelled with Sir John, and went to law with him; but
though he proved to be in the right, or rather because he proved to
be in the right, she employed Sir Christopher Wren to build the
house in St. James’s Park.”

I have to add a curious discovery respecting Vanbrugh himself,

which explains a circumstance in his life not hitherto understood.